Ged Carroll

Category: culture | 文明 | 미디어와 예술 | 人文

Culture was the central point of my reason to start this blog. I thought that there was so much to explore in Asian culture to try and understand the future.

Initially my interest was focused very much on Japan and Hong Kong. It’s ironic that before the Japanese government’s ‘Cool Japan’ initiative there was much more content out there about what was happening in Japan. Great and really missed publications like the Japan Trends blog and Ping magazine.

Hong Kong’s film industry had past its peak in the mid 1990s, but was still doing interesting stuff and the city was a great place to synthesise both eastern and western ideas to make them its own. Hong Kong because its so densely populated has served as a laboratory of sorts for the mobile industry.

Way before there was Uber Eats or Food Panda, Hong Kongers would send their order over WhatsApp before going over to pay for and pick up their food. Even my local McDonalds used to have a WhatsApp number that they gave out to regular customers. All of this worked because Hong Kong was a higher trust society than the UK or China. In many respects in terms of trust, its more like Japan.

Korea quickly became a country of interest as I caught the ‘Korean wave’ or hallyu on its way up. I also have discussed Chinese culture and how it has synthesised other cultures.

More recently, aspect of Chinese culture that I have covered has taken a darker turn due to a number of factors.

  • Classic movies + more things

    Watching classic movies and TV with my Dad. Some of the classic movies we watched I hadn’t seen since I was a child like Ice Station Zebra. Watching them with him now as an adult was a different experience and we discussed the relative merits of the plot as we went along. As a child, my Dad had bid me be quiet so that we didn’t miss any details.

    • True Romance – Tony Scott on direction, Tarantino on the script and great grind house cinema moments with a Sonny Chiba triple bill.
    • Ice Station Zebra – my Dad is a big fan of Alistair Maclean’s books, this is one of the better film adaptions of his books with Rock Hudson taking a starring role. Looking back on this now, it is the proto-Tom Clancy book. Confrontations with with the Russians, a tech gizmo and a Jack Ryan type figure who always does the right thing. Like Maclean’s books Clancy focused on pace rather than character building and character’s died at a steady tempo.
    • I worked my way through series one of The X-Files and was impressed by how fresh many of the episodes still felt. The tech looked old but the storytelling wasn’t. It was twenty years since I had last watched it. Then I was at college and watched each episode on the postage stamp sized screen of a Casio TV-100B handheld television that got me through college.

    a16z Podcast: Writing a New Language of Storytelling with Virtual Reality | Andreessen Horowitz – or why 2016 is going to take a good while to bring about the compelling content for VR to take hold as a mainstream consumer product

    Louis Vuitton casts video game character in new campaign – Dazed Digital – interesting logical progression from their series 3 exhibition earlier in the year. Interesting how luxury brands are taking the transition to digital in new directions

  • Things that made my day this week

    Dragon Ball characters appear in Ford anime ad specifically made for English-speakers 【Video】 – unfortunately it is unavailable in the UK, there must be some kind of geography-related images rights licensing issue with Dragon Ball. That’s a shame as it looks like a beautiful bit of work for Ford

    Great idiosyncratic video that talks about the kind of product design considerations customers need to think about in buying a quality bag. The less seams that you have, the less points of failure that you have in the bab. More design content here.

    Pressure Scale – great iPhone hack as a HTML 5 web app. It uses the iPhone’s own sensors to provide a pressure gauge. This goes to show the Swiss Army knife nature of smartphones.

    Quentin Tarantino has a reputation for interpolating other film makers work, that he picked up from his time working behind the counter of a great video rental store called Video Archives in Manhattan Beach, California. When it closed down he bought their complete catalogue of content. Some of this won’t have made it to digital formats such as Blu Ray or streaming. I presume that he’ll never be bored, with that comprehensive a film library.

    Hungry for more clicks, Zomato is running a killer marketing campaign on porn sites – PornHub has also done similar campaigns with the likes of Diesel jeans. There is a wider ethical discussion to have around this.

    Where the line falls will depend on the customer base and the corporate brand.

    Whilst it might be right for Axe or Lynx male grooming products, that doesn’t mean that Unilever should do it because of its corporate stance and the knock on effects to the likes of Dove.

    On the other hand, a brand that thrives on controversy like Dolce & Gabbana might be a much better fit.

  • My 10 most popular (trafficked) blog posts of 2015

    These are the ten most trafficked posts of 2015, in reverse order:

    Throwback gadget: Nokia N900 – I tried Nokia’s first Maemo-based phone. It was amazing how useless it was as one forgets how linked the modern smartphone is to web services. Despite these problems one could see the now lost potential of the phone. More on the Nokia N900 at GSMarena.

    Generational user experience effects – a meditation on user experience from the analogue era to the present

    2015: just where is it all going? – I had a think about where digital and technology would go over the next 12 months or so. You can see how I did here.

    Reflecting on Yahoo!’s Q2 2015 progress report on product prioritisation – by June this year, the product rationalisation that Yahoo! underwent provided ample opportunity to show that it’s core offering was collapsing in many international markets. Rather than it being a market wide condition, the data pointed to Yahoo! specific issues.

    Traackr – beyond the buzzword event – a post about how a diverse range of organisations from Coca-Cola to a luxury jeweller were thinking about influencer marketing.

    Throwback gadget: Made 2 Fade (by KAM) GM-25 Mk II phono pre-amp and mixer – a review of a mixer that has been lost in dance music culture history, yet was responsible for much of its popularity outside the super clubs.

    That Jeremy Clarkson post (or lies, damn lies and sentiment analysis) – or why everyone from the mainstream media to PR Week got the story so wrong about Jeremy Clarkson’s departure from Top Gear.

    An experiment on fake Twitter followers – I spent some of my hard-earned cash to see what difference if any buying fake followers had. I chose Twitter as a channel mainly because it would be easier to measure any impact, otherwise it could have just as easily been Facebook followers, Pinterest subscribers or Instagram followers. My overall conclusion on the fake follower business is that it almost purely about personal vanity rather than gaming a system.

    O2O (online to offline) or what we can learn from the Chinese – East Asia is way ahead of marketers in the west in terms of multi-channel marketing particularly the integration of of online with offline aspects.

    48 hours with the Apple Watch – hands down the most popular post of this year on my blog was my short experience living with the Apple Watch. I felt that it was a nicely designed, but un-Apple experience. It also convinced me that the use case for wearables wasn’t here yet.

    That’s the end of my posts of 2015.

  • WHITEvoid + more things

    WHITEvoid

    OrbitalInstallation by WHITEvoid is a large circular flip-dot installation for Volkswagen, find out more at Prosthetic Knowledge.

    It is really interesting to see that projects the one that they’ve done with WHITEvoid are funded by Volkswagen. I was reminded of teamLab and Troika.

    Pornhub

    Pornhub does consumer marketing with a suitable for work (SFW) advert for its gift card service providing subscriptions to its content. I can’t work out whether this is:

    • Trolling, just to build fame similar to much of Larry Flynt’s legal cases during the rise of the Hustler media empire
    • They genuinely believe that porn has become mainstream in a similar way to the 1970s when the great and the good would watch Behind The Green Door and other works from the industry’s ‘golden age’
    • They are aiming for ‘prank presents’ a la office secret Santa or a ‘bro’s’ birthday

    Its a ballsy move, they’re sticking their head above the parapet despite having issues around revenge porn on the platform and possible under-age content.

    Returning to space

    Helen Sharman, The First British Astronaut, Narrates an Animated Story of Her Recurring Dream of Returning to Space – feels very Kubrickesque phenomenon, on Vimeo so may not be visible to all viewers

    Porsche 935

    1977 Porsche 935 & Transporter | Uncrate – I love that Porsche designed their own transporters so that their cars were looked after in the right way. The transporter is based on a Magrius-Deutz truck, not a Mercedes truck like the article claims. It is interesting that it wasn’t a MAN truck given Porsche’s association with Volkswagen.

    Kartograph

    Kartograph – Drawing new geographic data over the infrastructure of old – really interesting technology meets art project. It reminds me of the locative art that appears in the speculative fiction of William Gibson, particularly his pattern recognition trilogy. More on where 2.0 here.

  • Beacons + more things

    Apple’s Failed Retail Revolution: Beacons Still Won’t Be Big on Black Friday – Bloomberg Business – the problem isn’t the technology but that retailers haven’t been innovative enough in their implementation of Beacons. Like QRcodes I wouldn’t write off Beacons yet. More web of no web posts here.

    Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Has an Insane Severance Package – Fortune – the curious thing is that her contract incentivised her to package up and sell off the core business and she has not taken the easy path on this

    WeChat Blocks Uber (Again) In Ongoing China Rideshare War | Motherboard – Uber is toast. In China, WeChat is the Internet for many people, it is rare for people to leave the WeChat app.

    Analyst claims Apple is prepping a 4 inch iPhone 6c for launch in Q1 – I get it from a product point of view, but it means that Apple has a lot of SKUs in the field which will affect software development etc.

    Konami Bans Metal Gear Solid 5 Creator Kojima From Game Awards – IGN – probably not the smartest move given Kojima’s stature, it will make it harder for Konami to get talent in the future. Not sure what’s going on at Konami

    Samsung Announces Updated Versions of the Galaxy A3, A5, and A7 – going after Xiaomi and Huawei’s P7 and Honor lines. I can see it working outside China but not in it. Nationalism is becoming more important in consumption

    Microsoft is handing off yet more of its advertising sales business to ad tech company AppNexus (MSFT) – focusing on core productivity and development offers. Makes me wonder when Xbox will away from Microsoft

    Lewis drops PR from its name, eyes bigger marketing budgets | Marketing Interactive – Interesting move which reinforces my view here

    Yahoo used to be bigger than Apple, Google, and Amazon. Now it might sell itself for scrap | Quartz – the headline sums up the tragedy quite neatly